**COMPLETED** - RYL Website Planned Outage (11pm 19.02.10 - 3am 20.02.10 [GMT])
 

Hi Everyone,

This is a very important message to let you all know that RYL and it's related systems, including chat, email and Live Help will be unavailable for a minimum of several hours tomorrow night between the above mentioned times. Please bear in mind that all times are UK-based i.e. GMT.

This planned downtime is necessary so that my web hosting company, Echo Internet, can relocate servers and network equipment to a new state of the art data centre based just outside London in Hemel Hempstead. Rather than go into great detail here, I am instead attaching our customer notification email sent to all Echo Internet customers which explains the reasons behind the move, for those that are interested in knowing more.

Rest assured I will be working as quickly as possible to complete the move and bring RYL back online as soon as possible. I'm very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause but unfortunately, work like this is completely unavoidable sometimes.

Please tell everyone you know on RYL about the move so as to minimise the chances of anyone not finding out. Feel free to PM me or reply to this thread if you have any questions at all.

Thanks everyone and take care,
James


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Our customer notification email follows for those that are interested in reading in more detail...
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Dear Customer,

This is an important message to let you know of significant planned downtime to our email, DNS and web hosting services which will occur tomorrow night from 11:00pm GMT on Friday the 19th of February through to approximately 3:00am GMT on the following Saturday morning.

The above mentioned maintenance window is to allow us to relocate our server and network equipment from our current presence in Docklands, London to a new state of the art facility just outside London, in Hemel Hempstead. Several factors have contributed to this decision but chief among them is the overcrowding of the Docklands data centre facilities and, as a consequence, spiralling costs for power and bandwidth. The relocation will provide a better environment for our equipment as well as greater room for our expansion and better facilities for our co-location customers. We will also have the benefit of a 100% SLA (Service Level Agreement) for both network and power from our suppliers at the new data centre. This will allow us to improve even further on our already exceptional systems availability.

All our systems will be disconnected from the internet when the work begins at 11pm. The move has been carefully planned and no IP addresses are changing and no action is required on your part. No email will be lost during this time and all email sent to customer domains will be spooled on one of our secondary servers and then delivered to our primary email platform once our systems come back online after the relocation is completed. We will be working hard to ensure that all our services are operating as expected after the work is completed. I will be available on my mobile throughout the night for any of our customers with mission critical websites who have any questions or concerns about restoration of their service. Please do not email us since those systems are also subject to the move and we cannot check our support email whilst the move is in progress.

Thank you very much for reading and please do feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions at all. I do apologise for the inconvenience this may cause but I am confident the move will allow us to continue to deliver the high levels of service you have come to expect from Echo Internet.

Kind regards,
James Molesworth

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Thanks for letting us know James.

Thanks for the advance warning

thanks for letting us know james.

I'll personally be asleep! But thanks. :)

Thank you for letting us know
Hope it goes ok

ooo feels like a snow day at work :P (No modding for a few hours!)xx

thanks for the heads up

so we just cant get on for 4 hours? And when we come back it'll all be as normal?

Silent Screams - Yes, that's correct. We're allowing up to 4 hours to complete the move but the hope is that most systems will be back online by around 2am or earlier.

Everything will be as normal once the move is completed, yes :)

Wow I got confused.

Thought this meant 'today', but it's the 18th :P

I remember when the oil tanks blew up in Hemel Hempstead Hertfordshire because I could never forget those names. They sounded like an exercise Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady would use. Good luck.

I've been to hemel. And yes, they did have the big explosions a few years back there.

Thanks for heads up and all.

I live near to Hemel. And my caravan is in the storage site right opposite the oil place. It was ok. But we were helping people pick up their windows.

Just a quick update to let you all know that the relocation has been completed. I'm just checking the last of our systems over now but everything looks to be in order - completed in record time as well, an hour and 15 minutes ahead of our deadline :)

Thanks for your patience everyone whilst this essential work was undertaken.

Take care,

James

Thank-you :)

Thanks James. Youre a star :)

Thanks James :)

Thanks for the heads up.